News and Insight for Sales Leaders by Gerhard Gschwandtner

Sales Enablement

03/23/2016

Today’s guest post is by Karen McCandless, editor of the GetApp blog and writer for the GetApp Lab. GetApp is a Gartner company, which is the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company.

Do your salespeople feel more like data-entry clerks than sales professionals? Are they spending most of their time documenting their activities rather than focusing on selling? As a manager, are you spending hours managing your sales pipeline and forecast in Excel? Does communication with your customers feel like a mess – with key clients receiving pitches from different salespeople while other customers get no response at all?

If these statements sound familiar, it’s time to invest in sales management software. Fortunately, you have many options. Here are four questions to better understand how to choose the best sales management software for your organization.

“What should I look for in a sales management app?”

Sales management apps have come a long way since the days of being slightly more complex versions of spreadsheets. Key functionalities to look for include the following.

Sales analytics

Lead/contact management

Email integration

Sales forecasting

Pricing optimization

Predictive analytics

Collaboration

Reporting

There are many other features that can help increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your sales processes, but the most important task is to identify what is must-have, what is optional, or what is unnecessary for your team. While you could choose software from a market leader with all the bells and whistles, if you’re not going to use half of the features, you’re wasting your time and money.

“Which benefits will persuade my finance team to sign off on purchasing sales-management software?”

It’s not always easy to convince your finance department to fork out for a new piece of software. Aside from the obvious benefits software can offer – making it easier for your sales staff to do their job and for your customers to do business with you – there are at least three points that can help you make your case to the finance team.

Sales management software can automate a whole host of time-consuming manual tasks; this will free you up to concentrate on the more important jobs at hand.

By getting better visibility into all activities through reporting functionality, you can better identify what is going wrong (and right) and act accordingly, with the added bonus of better forecasting.

You will also be able to better manage your pricing strategy through pricing optimization functionalities; and pulling in information from your email system will ensure smooth and transparent communication with your clients.

“Should I build or buy software?”

Once you’ve got an idea of what you’re looking for and how it will help your business, it’s important to consider whether you should purchase software from an external company or have it custom made.

These days, the benefits of choosing a cloud-based sales management solution tend to outweigh the advantages of custom-built software. This is because SaaS deployments:

Cut down on implementation and training time

Reduce the burden on IT support

Enable more predictable pricing

Provide better scalability, allowing you to add or remove licenses on demand.

“What other factors should I consider?”

Look into rankings. You can see GetApp’s quarterly ranking of the top 25 sales management apps to get an objective snapshot of your software options.

Consider integrations. No app will work in isolation, so investigating whether your sales management solution integrates well with other software you already use – such as HR or accounting – is also crucial.

Keep mobility in mind. Having a sales management mobile app is key to enable anytime, anywhere working and staying in touch with clients on the go.

Read reviews. Find out what other users think of the app you’re considering. This will help you form a more rounded opinion. Maybe an app is better for enterprises, more suited to technical users, or is a good fit for a particular industry.

If you’ve already been through this process – and now have great sales management software in your business – let us know how you chose it in the comments below.

01/27/2016

Today’s post is by Wendy Mack, director of consulting services for Wilson Learning Corporation. She has more than 20 years of experience in sales effectiveness, leadership, and organizational development arenas. She has co-authored three books on the topics of learning, leadership, and change.

In working with sales organizations around the globe, I have found that everyone wants a piece of the sales force. Internal functions such as marketing, training and development, R&D, and sales operations all have information they want to get out to sales. When these functions aren’t working together, the result tends to be costly chaos.

When working with companies, I ask three questions to help them assess whether this is an issue for them. Consider if any of the following are true for you:

Are various internal functions competing for your salespeople’s time?

Are your salespeople receiving conflicting messages from different sources?

Is time being wasted in training that doesn’t drive sales?

A Better Way – Sales Enablement

As we have all seen over the past few years, more and more companies have sought to address the information overload problem by establishing sales enablement functions. The emphasis on sales enablement grew out of what Harvard Business Review calls “the notoriously fraught relationship between sales and marketing.” As companies sought solutions for aligning sales and marketing to drive better revenue results, people started to talk about how marketing and other functions could and should enable sales.

I have encountered numerous and varying definitions of sales enablement. We view sales enablement as:

An approach that bridges the gap between the sales strategy and execution and provides the sales force with all of the information and resources they need to generate revenue.

An effective sales enablement function allows you to be deliberate and strategic in managing how information is transmitted and accessed. Of course, it’s one thing to call a person or team “sales enablement” – it’s another to actually have a positive impact on sales performance.

What Enablement Isn’t

Sales enablement is a relatively new term and many companies make the mistake of applying the new term to old ways of doing things. They rename “sales training” to “sales enablement” or they decide to create more mobile or technology-assisted selling tools and call it sales enablement. The reality is that learning and technology are important to sales enablement, but they are only parts of the equation. Focusing on any one element in a vacuum is likely to produce limited results.

A Systems View of Sales Enablement

Based on our ongoing work in the arena of sales effectiveness, we have identified four elements that must be aligned and fully integrated for any sales enablement approach to be fully effective:

Sales processes and systems

Information and resources

Learning strategy

Leadership practices

When these elements are aligned in support of a clear go-to-market strategy and consistent vision for the customer experience, organizations can:

Speed time-to-productivity for new hires

Minimize disruption of both sales and sales support functions

Reduce time out of the field

Ensure consistent messages to the market, regardless of channel

Positively impact customers’ perception of their experience

Integrating these elements requires cross-functional dialogue, shared commitments, agreements, and accountability among multiple functions. Sales executives do not need to be experts in marketing, technology, and training. However, it is critical that they drive and facilitate alignment and coordination across all of the functions and people who support sales. We think Harvard’s Cespedes and Gartner’s Bova make the point well: “The cross-functional communication and coordination that is required to navigate this change is the job of leadership.” Let Me Leave You with This

An effective sales enablement approach can yield increases in sales as well as cost savings. Done well, it will reduce redundancies, eliminate time spent searching for information and resources, and limit time spent out of the field. Done poorly, sales enablement is just another fad that will disappoint and then disappear.

12/15/2015

Today's post is by Scott Eidle, an evangelist for sales best practices, including sales process, enablement, and operations. He leverages more than 20 years of sales and marketing experience to share insight about the top trends in the software and technology sales space, and is currently a global sales enablement executive for an enterprise software company.

With the iPad® Pro™ hitting the market, companies will once again try to figure out if and how they can incorporate a cool, exciting piece of technology into their sales programs…and the concept of BYOD (bring your own device) will likely get serious considerations as a cheap and fast alternative to laying out a lot of cash for yet another piece of hardware. But are the results worth it?

In my opinion, no. Many companies should just forget about BYOD tablet programs and focus on other ways to support their field sales teams. Here are four reasons why.

Reason #1: Most BYOD programs have 30 percent participation rates.

I’ve had first-hand experience with sales-enablement professionals at world-class, enterprise sales organizations that had attempted BYOD programs for tablets. These clients set the standards for excellent sales operations and were implementing methodical, tested rollout strategies. They had great ideas and a fair amount of money. And the resounding results reported by their sales enablement and operations executives? A 30 percent participation rate. Of that 30 percent, user engagement was never high enough for them to consider even their 30 percent as active participants in the programs. If companies operating at this level get these results, other companies can probably expect even less.

Reason #2: BYOD programs come with hidden costs.

It starts off with best intentions. “Let’s give the sales teams iPads! They will rock in front of customers! We’ll be so much more impressive than our competitors!” The enthusiasm is great, but most of these intentions end up on the cutting-room floor when budgets get down to the nitty-gritty.

The reality is that fully-connected iPads will double your costs in terms of technology support. This is for various reasons:

No one buys an iPad to replace their field laptops,

iPads aren’t cheap to begin with,

Wireless programs for iPad data are expensive, and

You need special programs to adequately present all those Microsoft® PowerPoint® presentations you’ve created over the years.

Reason #3: The iPad is too “personal.”

Most people view their phones and iPads in different lights. While a phone is a personal device, we also use it to call, email, or text our professional colleagues and contacts. (This is why the business world has learned to accept brief responses, misspellings, and the occasional funny autocorrect when we see the “sent from my iPhone” line at the end of an email.)

By contrast, the iPad is a symbol of escape – relaxing, browsing at one’s leisure, everything that is associated with avoiding work. Expecting anyone to willingly and intentionally use an iPad for doing yet more work is just a fantasy.

Reason #4: Real business is still done on Windows, and it’s just not that easy to do real work on an iPad.

Even with the introduction of the iPad Pro, which is taking huge strides to make itself more like a Windows® Surface™ machine, trying to conduct business on an iPad just isn’t that easy. The apps don’t work the same way they do on a laptop – no matter how they are advertised – and, while word processing and typing emails has gotten much better (thank you, third-party keypads!), trying to do anything with an Excel spreadsheet or a PowerPoint presentation is just an awful experience. And let’s not forget that the majority of salespeople are not the best at paperwork or PowerPointing anyway! You don’t want to add the frustration of trying to finger-tap an Excel box on their screen or move and resize a graphic in a presentation. I understand that operations and enablement teams want to help salespeople and make their lives easier. But, given all these considerations, I think it’s best to steer clear of BYOD programs and invest in other forms of support.

10/20/2015

Today's post is by Scott Eidle, an evangelist for sales best practices, including sales process, enablement, and operations. He leverages more than 20 years of sales and marketing experience to share insight about the top trends in the software and technology sales space, and is currently a global sales enablement executive for an enterprise software company.

Investing in Salesforce.com has become the mark of a truly committed sales organization. Regardless of the quality of your implementation, or how well your sales team actually uses it, the investment tells the rest of the world (and your reps) that you intend to run a high-performance organization.

What started as a simple premise – providing salespeople with easy-to-access information about their prospects and clients so they can more easily focus on the job of selling – has matured into a complex maze of bolt-ons, point solutions, and customization strategies that have made managing Salesforce.com a complex endeavor. If you live in a Salesforce.com world, you experience the benefits – as well as the pitfalls – of balancing this power and complexity on a daily basis.

The Salesforce.com ecosystem consists of customers, the apps in the App Exchange, partners, and developers. Dreamforce (the annual Salesforce.com convention held in San Francisco every fall) puts the entire Salesforce.com ecosystem on display. What Dreamforce also has done is highlight the complexities of working with the Salesforce.com ecosystem to provide these benefits. Here are some of the best and worst parts of working with that ecosystem to achieve your objectives.

The Best

Whatever the hottest topic is – or whatever the newest trend will be – you’ll see it in the form of ecosystem partners. Some of these topics and partners from past years include marketing automation (Marketo), cloud storage of documents (Box, Dropbox), CPQ or configure-price-quote systems (BigMachines, Steelbrick), and a focus on inside sales teams (InsideSales.com). Partners that get promotions from Salesforce.com are usually good investments for improving your organization (depending on your specific needs, of course).

The ecosystem partners can help your company implement these improvement programs at a rapid clip. They have already implemented these programs, and – with that experience – are able to quickly bring best practices to your teams. Most of these best practices are programs and initiatives that sales leaders want to emphasize throughout their sales ranks anyway, but spending money with an ecosystem partner provides a point of focus for every level of the organization to rally around and emphasize their intended results.

Using systems written and supported by the ecosystem – which you can find on Salesforce.com’s partner showcase called the AppExchange – can drastically reduce your dependency on your own company’s IT resources. Trying to replicate the same outcome with your own resources – the time, money, and effort from your IT organization, which also won't have the expertise these singularly focused vendors will have – can be a difficult and painful process. Too often the plans that involve any IT customizations will get caught up in resource scarcity issues, causing delays and headaches to everyone who has to barter for the dedicated focus from the IT department required to implement a new program; and, as with any custom software project, “custom” can also be used as a synonym for “difficult to maintain.”

Spending money with an ecosystem partner places that responsibility with the partner, who has a vested interest in keeping clients happy at the risk of bad publicity.

The Worst

Salesforce.com implementations are usually not “vanilla” enough to simply plug and play every ecosystem solution into them. While the emphasis for most SaaS solutions is focused on configuration and not customization, it’s the personalization of each company’s configuration that can cause headaches when trying to plug in a complementary product. One of the most common configuration roadblocks tends to be the screen design of system pages – having too many or too few fields or sections can make it difficult to display additional widgets when you are effectively competing for screen space. And the rule of thumb is that, if your salesperson cannot see the widget on their opening display (that is, what they are able to read at their first glance when reaching that page) – they are less likely to leverage that tool.

A new power-broker has emerged as a major gatekeeper for all ecosystem projects: your company’s Salesforce.com Administrator. The “SFDC Admin” has a huge responsibility to your organization – one that is not taken lightly; it’s this person’s job to make sure the system operates as planned and provides you with the results you expect. This has evolved into an almost Herculean task. They have to have protect the overall vision of the system and weigh the requests of different sales team executives. They are also the ones tasked with the responsibility of ensuring that any ecosystem project operates as planned and, more importantly, doesn’t negatively impact any of the existing configurations in your instance. The result is that, while most SFDC Admins can’t make the decision to buy a complementary system, they can absolutely stall or kill an ecosystem implementation if the risks outweigh the reward. (Note: I LOVE SFDC ADMINS! Please don't think otherwise. The point here is that they have been thrust into an unenviable position where they must be the voice of reason to every project being thrown at them – and too few salespeople have the foresight to include them in the discussions instead of hoping they will excitedly approve every project.)

Salesforce.com has a growing focus on providing IT departments with the ability to write custom programs that mimic ecosystem systems. With the introduction of Force.com programming capabilities, it’s become a common “Build vs. Buy” discussion every time a sales leader wants to purchase something from the ecosystem. What was once the cornerstone promise of the Salesforce.com SaaS approach – to “remove the sales team’s dependency on their company’s IT resources” – has come full circle at many companies, where the IT departments have invested efforts into Force.com projects. The question then becomes: “Can we do it? Yes. But should we do it? Well, that depends… .”" As mentioned before, anything “custom” requires a full commitment to the time, resources, and energy of not only writing those programs but also providing ongoing support for them – a commitment that is difficult to maintain for any company.

Do you have questions about the Salesforce.com ecosystem? Stories to share? Leave your thoughts in the comments section.

09/30/2015

With only a few hours remaining in the quarter, sales teams are frantically calling, emailing, texting and employing miscellaneous acts of heroics to get deals done. It’s a scramble that all of us in B-to-B have witnessed, and one that we've at one point or another committed to never doing again. However, all too often the pattern repeats itself, and sales teams dial and email everyone in CRM to find and land that “flier” deal to make the quarter.

Don’t call everyone. It doesn’t work, and it’s a waste of time.

Buyers are sharing precious insights with every opened email, view of a shared presentation or proposal and even forwarding the proposed contract. These digital signals identify which deals are active and provide a tremendous first cut at prioritizing which buyers to call first and which deals have a shot at coming in to close the quarter.

Even deals once written off as “dead” hold value. In past couple of days, we saw a buyer in a deal we thought was lost begin to interact with a TinderBox sales proposal. The buyer returned to products and pricing pages, so our sales team reached out, provided insight, and it looks like we’re going to earn the business this quarter. It’s a great win, and a solid validation that prioritizing engagement is more about the buyer than the salesperson.

Here are three ways to ensure you connect with the right buyers first:

1. Listen to buyers. The highest potential buyers are identifying themselves through every online interaction. Use engagement information and analytics from marketing automation systems like Pardot, Marketo and Eloqua, along with sales technologies like TinderBox and Yesware to make it easy to identify the digital signals buyers send when they interact with content like sales proposals and contracts.

2. Prioritize the most engaged buyers. It’s important to remember that a buyer is more often a group of people rather than a single decision maker. Prioritize calls and emails to accounts where buyers are actively reviewing, forwarding and revisiting the contract. Even better – prioritize follow up to accounts where those with authority to sign a contract are actively engaged.

3. Make it easier to say "yes." Every second counts for both you and your buyer. Use esignature technologies like DocuSign in your contracts and make it easy for prospects to sign from any device, anywhere. Making the signature process digital also reduces the chance for errors and keeps CRM updated with every acceptance.

Prioritizing the right buyer at the right time is essential to make the final sprint to close the quarter a success. Understanding where buyers are in their journey, how they’re engaging and what’s most important to them, gives sales teams the information they need to prioritize the deals most likely to close. While technology has advanced to make identifying and acting upon digital insights possible, they’re only signals. It’s the sales professional that ultimately gets deals done and makes a successful quarter possible.

09/10/2015

Today's post is by Lisa Clark, vice president of marketing at Qstream.

Companies invest millions in their CRM, yet, when it comes time to close deals, research shows that most achieve less than 50 percent of forecast on average. That’s because CRM systems don’t drive buying decisions – people do.

CRM systems are suited to capture sales activity and manage account data. They are less equipped to be engines of sales execution. The prevailing focus on add-ons designed to accelerate sales processes has left a gaping hole in our thinking on the human skills required to close deals.

Information and marketing content tools can help, but, alone, the only thing they enable are rote sales presentations in which your salespeople are answering questions the customer isn’t necessarily asking.

Knowing what reps are personally prepared to bring to every client interaction is the missing link for sales leadership today. Emerging data-driven solutions are changing the game – with a new class of insights designed to proactively and predictively manage the capabilities of your salespeople.

Imagine you are looking at a forecast for an upcoming quarter. Your CRM dashboard reveals a solid deal flow, and you’re feeling extremely optimistic. Then you bring up a view of sales force capabilities. In a matter of seconds, you see that your sales team’s understanding of the new discovery and qualification process is weak.

Now, how confident do you feel?

While process-based data – revenue numbers, quotas, and sales pipeline figures – give you a picture of what is happening or has happened, qualitative data on sales capabilities gives you the confidence to identify and correct issues before they can negatively impact revenue.

When you look at the richness of sales force data available today, we are still only scratching the surface. New solutions based on behavioral science and native integration with CRM systems are disrupting traditional sales enablement approaches.

New sales performance solutions for CRM not only move critical reinforcement closer to the point of need; they also provide continuous real-time management updates, trends, and comparisons that help sales leadership:

Measure and manage team capabilities throughout the sales cycle – with engagement and proficiency metrics against any KPI

Act on targeted coaching insights that accelerate time to productivity and reinforce new selling methodologies, product and competitive messages for better quality customer interactions.

Let’s face it. The sales function today is in need of massive change to help reps sell contextually, at higher levels. More than one-third of enterprise sales reps – even those with extensive market and product training – arrive at sales calls unprepared or unable to apply the critical context needed to successfully sell into their markets.

CRM can help, but these tools are intended to align with the demands of sales processes, not salespeople or customers. And, if your team isn’t prepared to execute, it’s more likely that your competitors will become the disruptors – not your technology investments.

03/18/2015

Amanda Kahlow is CEO and founder of 6sense. Prior to 6sense, Amanda spent 14 years as the CEO and founder of CI Insights, a big-data services company that used multichannel analytics to help enterprise companies generate as much as $300 million in net-new business.

What would it take for your sales team to stay on top of the pipeline and effectively manage sales opportunities? Better incentives? Micromanagement? Magic?

We say the answer is predictive intelligence.

Every day, your buyers and prospects are leaving digital footprints, buying signals that indicate whether they are in the market to buy, what products they prefer, and perhaps the vendors they are considering.

By tying together billions of rows of time-sensitive data, predictive intelligence distills all these digital signals into insight that sales professionals can use immediately, leading to faster close rates and increased sales.

For example, our customers’ sales teams receive regular alerts about new prospects that 6sense has found and regular notifications about prospects’ progression through the funnel. All this valuable information is captured with no extra work required from the sales teams.

Think about how fast you’re going through leads. If you’re running through them, you’re not alone; ample lead supply is a common pain point for sales. The predictive intelligence platform by 6sense alleviates this issue by identifying entirely net-new prospects who are either in the market to buy your specific product or actively looking at other options in your industry. Say a company is showing intent to buy your type of product but hasn’t discovered your brand. The 6sense predictive engine will detect that this prospect is in the market to buy and will inform your sales team, who can jump on the opportunity.

One of our customers used 6sense to identify business that resulted in the third largest deal in the company’s history – and this prospect was about to buy from a competitor! Another 6sense customer was able to double its opportunity sizes, and 70 percent of those opportunities were net-new prospects who had never “raised their hands” and were not in marketing-automation or customer relationship management systems.

2) Get a full-funnel picture of all your prospects.

So now that you have plenty of new leads, what about everyone else? Your reps must understand where potential buyers are in their journey. With predictive intelligence, that’s possible.

Say you want to sell to 10 specific people; however, if their activity doesn’t indicate that they’re in the market to buy, then you know you don’t need to focus on those 10 prospects for the time being. Instead, jump on the ones who are showing active interest in your products. Stop guessing and start selling. One of our customers told us that, before using 6sense, 33 touches were required to convert a lead to an opportunity. After using 6sense, it took only 10.

Do sales managers need to be charismatic to become great leaders? Not necessarily. In fact, people often assume that charisma is a more important quality than it really is. Although charismatic people might be able to inspire others for a period of time, leaders will not have staying power unless they can combine that charisma with a number of other, more substantial qualities.

For example, all great leaders possess a dream or a vision. Think of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his “I Have a Dream” speech. This speech outlined a very powerful vision, and it helped generate an equally powerful momentum that propelled the Civil Rights Movement forward.

Whether you’re naturally charismatic or not, you can develop a winning vision for the future and learn to articulate that vision in an inspiring way. Every sales leader should know where his or her organization is headed over the next six to 24 months. When developing your plan for success, keep these four key elements in mind:

Four Key Elements of a Great Sales Vision

The vision must be future focused.

The vision must be challenging but achievable.

The vision must acknowledge the current situation and provide a clear portrait of what success will look like.

The vision must align with organizational goals.

Watch my video interview below with Selling Power founder Gerhard Gschwandtner to learn specific examples of how you can formulate and apply a winning leadership vision.

What is your sales leadership vision for your organization, and how did you develop it? Share your thoughts in the comments section.

02/03/2015

Does your sales process provide salespeople with the knowledge they need to win the short-term competitive advantage?

The paradox of today’s world is that long-term growth is actually driven by your sales team’s response to rapid, short-term changes. In her book, The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business, Columbia Business School professor Rita Gunther McGrath argues that the sustainable competitive advantage is quickly disappearing. Instead, business leaders learn to compete on a series of short-term competitive advantages.

Speed is the name of the game now, and most sales teams are not equipped to keep pace. Changes are occurring so rapidly that salespeople need rapid knowledge. Consider the following scenarios that call for agile responses and a real-time knowledge base.

Your value proposition changes due to a new acquisition, divestiture, or new product/service.

Your sales strategy changes, with emphasis on a new pricing or service model or ideal customer profile.

Your competitors’ value proposition changes due to a new acquisition, divestiture, or new product/service.

Your customers’ needs shift due to regulatory or geopolitical events.

Legacy CRM, marketing strategies, and sales-training solutions do little to provide salespeople with real-time knowledge. For example, consider how these three tools are no longer supporting sales teams the way they used to.

MARKETING

American Management Association reports that 90 percent of what sales is getting from marketing is not being used. Marketing/product management needs to replace generic feature/benefit statements with real-time messaging and a knowledge base that reflects the rapid shifts in sales strategy, value propositions, and customer needs.

CRM

In this SlideShare presentation, “Improving Sales in a Brave New World,” James Rogers points out that 74 percent of organizations report low adoption of CRM. The fact is, CRM systems need to be turned upside down. Instead of using technology to ask salespeople to fill out forms, use technology to deliver competitive knowledge that salespeople can use to stay ahead of rapid changes in the market.

SALES TRAINING

American companies spend $16 billion annually on sales training; CSO Insights reports that 70 percent of that learning is gone within 30 days. Make the shift from generic process and sales methodology to a knowledge-based approach that gives salespeople real-time data that allows them to compete at the speed of change. Salespeople also need to be trained in how to leverage knowledge in customer conversations rather than how to execute methodology.

5600blue has introduced the first-ever vertically integrated sales-enablement solution that builds a knowledge base that tracks with current changes at every phase of the sales process. The technology houses, distributes, and updates knowledge in formats salespeople can use (Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and email) and enablement in the form of sales training, deal coaching, and win/loss reviews.

This knowledge aligns with every step of the sales process and helps salespeople

qualify customers and make pursuit decisions in line with shifting management priorities regarding what an ideal prospect looks like,

This knowledge also enables salespeople to leverage value throughout the sales process. For example, we know from 12 years of win/loss reviews among deals collectively worth $20 billion that winners win when they show customers how they meet their needs at higher probability and lower risk than the alternatives. We also know from our primary research that more than 85 percent of companies say they can’t deliver that knowledge to salespeople in real time.

Similarly, we know that 97 percent of buyer negotiation tactics follow predictable patterns. 5600blue puts knowledge in the hands of salespeople in advance of the negotiation to change that conversation early on.

The biggest changes in selling in the last 25 years are occurring right now. This shift is driven by the digital revolution, which puts much more information in the hands of buyers and competitors. Start taking steps today to equip your salespeople with the knowledge they need to compete in the short term so that your team can win in the long term.

12/22/2014

What does it mean to be an authentic leader who listens and gives direction successfully? In this candid interview, Senior Vice President and Chief Learning Officer of SAP Jenny Dearborn shares the moment she first met with Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP. In less than an hour she walked away impressed with his unique leadership style. Discover the essence of great leadership in three steps.

1) Listen deeply. Bill opened this meeting by telling the team they were the leaders. "What do I need to know? What's working? What's not working? How can I help you?"

2) Reiterate what you've heard. Bill ran through all the points the team discussed and said, "Here's what I've heard in this hour." This helped the team collaborate more effectively and stay on the same page.

3) Take action. Bill sent a summary of the meeting promptly and made sure to follow up to help the team execute on the items discussed.

I have met Bill several times and I agree with Jenny that he has that rare ability to inspire people and line them up behind his vision. His openness and generosity make people feel lucky to be part of his team.

I want to thank Jenny for taking the time to share this story with me on camera. She is also an impressive leader and has an energy level that many executives would envy. Jenny has been a presenter on the main stage at two Sales 2.0 Conferences where she has shared great insight on the topic of sales enablement. I'm pleased to say our editorial team is working on a cover story about Jenny that we will publish in Selling Power magazine next year. Keep an eye out for it.

What do you think makes a great leader? Share your thoughts in the comments section.